Pitt innovators are ready to show off their ideas at the 3 Rivers Venture Fair. A university technology showcase will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 12 p.m. on Tuesday, February 7th at the Wyndham Grand Hotel in Pittsburgh.
The Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a sponsor of the event where innovation teams working to hone their value proposition can meet potential investors and get critical feedback on further de-risking their technologies for future investment.
We featured three of the six teams in a previous post. Here are the remaining three:
EndoDx
Endometriosis is a gynecological disease affecting 10% of women, or 200 million worldwide. Currently, the only accepted diagnostic technique for this disease is surgery to visualize the disease, with 60 percent of patients discovering they do not have endometriosis. EndoDx is a non-invasive machine learning endometriosis diagnosis tool which will use patient-specific inputs to identify disease presence and stage.
COMMERCIAL APPLICATION
EndoDx is a software as a service license with a pay-per-use model which will be implemented early in the patient-treatment pipeline within gynecology suites. Ideally, EndoDx would be used during annual gynecology visits for symptomatic patients where clinicians could collect necessary inputs prior to or during the visit. Early implementation of EndoDx in patient care will enable earlier identification of endometriosis presence and/or stage and use as a clinical decision support tool to help avoid the nearly $3 billion worth of diagnostic surgeries that do not result in a diagnosis of endometriosis.
CONTACT: Janice Panza, Technology Licensing Manager jpanza@innovation.pitt.edu
Parenting While Black
Black parents have all the responsibilities of traditional parenting, yet also must help their children understand and navigate racism experiences and corresponding barriers to thriving educational, health, and mental health outcomes in the US. There are few rigorously established parenting resources that directly address the racism-related challenges faced by Black parents and their children. Parenting While Black (PWB) utilizes group-based, interactive programming to provide Black parents with tools to improve their own and their children's academic and mental health outcomes. To date, PWB parents have shown statistically significant increases in the use of target parenting outcomes, including positive racial affirmations, transmitting discrimination coping strategies, and academic socialization. Other program products in development include self-administered, knowledge-building home activities, and a self-paced digital version of the original program.
COMMERCIAL APPLICATION
Parenting While Black holds a strategic programming advantage as it enters the $16 billion parenting self-help market. Demand for this type of programming is high among the 14 million Black families nationally. Moreover, the family counseling and crisis intervention services industry produces $1.7 billion in annual profits and has experienced a 48% in growth over the last five years. Multiple consumer bases can be targeted with variations on the product. The core group facilitation program focuses on customers at the organizational level (e.g., schools, community organizations, churches), with both a train-the-trainer and onsite service models as commercial options. Meanwhile, individual parents and families could benefit from several variations on the content.
CONTACT: Carolyn Weber, Technology Licensing Associate cweber@innovation.pitt.edu
Surface Design Solutions
This team is developing a machine learning platform relevant to industrial customers interested in surfaces or interfaces. It offers a physics-informed machine learning platform developed by leading experts in the field of tribology. The platform allows users to input surface measurements and performance metrics taken from manufactured parts and analyze them using the machine learning algorithm to offer the customer two key insights. First, the software reveals which surface features are contributing to the performance of each part. Second, the software uses the inputs as training data to predict performance of future parts based only on a measurement of the surface roughness. This allows customers to avoid costly QA testing.
This platform exists for academic users at https://contact.engineering and allows to store and organize surface measurements, characterize surface topography, analyze contact properties and share data with collaborators or even publish datasets. The platform does not yet include the machine learning capabilities. These capabilities are the unique value proposition of our company and will be sold to industry customers.
COMMERCIAL APPLICATION
Surface metrology, the characterization of materials and surfaces, is a $21B industry, with software making up $5.3B of that market. The innovators aim to capture a share of this market by offering something that no competitor is equipped to do. The platform we have developed creates a link between surface roughness and part performance and offers complete flexibility for customers to implement it their existing pipelines.
This platform will give users a standardized platform for recording surface data and reporting meaningful and intuitive results far beyond what is typically reported that will allow customers to bypass the time- and cost-inefficient processes they currently use to optimize surfaces and interfaces in their manufacturing processes. This applies to the machines used in manufacturing, the parts being manufactured, or components in a final product assembly.
CONTACT: George Coulston, Senior Licensing Manager for Physical Sciences, gcoulston@innovation.pitt.edu